Stephanie Barczewski
Appearances
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes
The laws of ships had just simply not kept up with the expansion in size of ships over time.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes
The world is changing, right? When we talk about it being the kind of millionaire special, we are talking about American plutocrats more than we're talking about British aristocrats, although there are a handful. The Countess of Rothes and a few other kind of wealthy upper-class British people are on board the ship.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes
But mostly when we talk about wealth on the Titanic, we're talking about American wealth.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes
So they're leaving Southampton, and the suction that the Titanic creates as it's sort of backing out of its berth starts to pull the ropes of all the other ships that are docked in Southampton. There's a lot of them docked there because there's a coal strike at the time, so a lot of ships are actually unable to sail.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes
They've had to cannibalize coal from other White Star ships so that the Titanic can actually go on its first voyage.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes
People say the ropes went off like cannon shots, right? And the ropes snap. They're holding the stern of the New York to the dock, and the stern of it starts to swing out towards the Titanic.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes
Captain Smith performs really well. He knows what to do. He just gives a little burst on the propeller on one side of the Titanic and it actually pushes the New York back towards the dock and everything's okay. But it does actually delay the Titanic by like an hour and a half.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes
You think, oh, that just hadn't have happened. That iceberg wouldn't have been right in that place, right? Right in exactly that way where it crossed the Titanic's path.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes
This race to build bigger, better, different ships that are competing for sort of different markets and in different ways, it's causing them to kind of push up against the limits of what they can do in terms of maritime technology. It's not actually so much the Titanic that comes to mind here. I think if we think about the Lusitania.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes
So when the Lusitania gets hit by a German torpedo in 1915, the problem is that V-shaped hull of the Lusitania that has been designed to make the ship very fast, it becomes a major liability because what happens is that the torpedo hits the ship on one side, right? So it's tilting.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes
And a huge problem why people can't get off the Lusitania is because when it starts to tilt, what happens with the lifeboats... The lifeboats on one side are swinging out so far away from the side of the ship that you can't get from the ship to the lifeboat, right? Because the lifeboat's too far away.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes
And so, you know, I'm not going to say that it's because of the shape of the Lusitania's hull that all these people die on the Lusitania, but it's a contributing factor. You can't design for sort of every eventuality, but I think we can certainly see in these stories the kind of limits of shipbuilding technology. And I think that, you know, the Titanic was a good example of that.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes
Again, I don't want to overstate this. I don't want to make it sound like this is why it crashed, but they were pushing a little bit against the limits of like what maritime technology could do.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes
It was built basically to withstand a head-on collision. It was built to withstand if another ship hit it and hit precisely at the juncture of two compartments. It was built to withstand that.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes
And to be very fair to them, it is a very fluky, precise set of circumstances that causes it.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes
They weren't thinking the ship could smash into something or something could smash into it. They weren't thinking it was going to scrape along the side of something.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes
There were 9,000 other ways that it could have hit the iceberg, and it wouldn't have had the incredibly catastrophic result that it had. It's just this complete, you know, kind of butterfly effect of, you know, eight million tiny little things happen from the moment they laid the keel in Belfast to the time that it hit the iceberg.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
2. Bad Luck Comes in Threes
And if one of those eight million things hadn't happened, then maybe it wouldn't have actually hit that iceberg. I think that bothers us. We don't like to believe that life is that random.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
Ireland is kind of on the brink of civil war. Very, very few Catholics, if any, worked at Harland and Wolfe. It's a heavily Protestant workforce. Everybody knew that. And so when the Titanic sinks, all these stories arise. And probably the most famous one is that there's a rumor that the whole number of Titanic, if you held it up to a mirror, and looked at it backwards, it spelled no Pope, right?
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
And that this is a story that Catholics invent to say that basically it's Protestant arrogance that caused the sinking. It's a vengeful Catholic God who sinks the ship for this sort of Protestant effrontery. It's a slight complication with that theory, right? Is that there were a significant number of Irish Catholic immigrants on that ship, right, in the steerage class.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
We don't want the diseased people communing with the healthy, the presumably healthy people, right, the healthy upper class people in first class. So we have to keep them away. That's why those barriers are there and they're still there.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
I mean, if you've ever flown transatlantically, when they do that thing that always makes you feel when you're back in, you know, sort of cattle class, right, as most of us are, and they pull that curtain across from first class, right, that's a remnant of the same American laws.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
Those physical barriers that are required to be between first class or business class and the rest of the airplane, that's the same, those locked gates that we talk about on Titanic, that's the same laws that created those.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
9. The Long Hours Before Dawn
They do come in for criticism. You know, so there are these upper class British people. When they're in the lifeboat, the crew members start talking about how they've lost everything, right? They've lost basically all their possessions, all their uniforms.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
9. The Long Hours Before Dawn
And so I think in a gesture that was genuinely meant to be a gesture of goodwill, they do give everyone in the lifeboat five pounds each to replace their lost possessions. It then looks like afterwards that somehow they were paying off the crew members not to tell something nefarious, right? That it happened sort of in the lifeboat.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
9. The Long Hours Before Dawn
When the lifeboats are launched, most of them are not full. Some of the ones close to the end are pretty full, but most of them are not full. There's lots of seats in them. So those lifeboats are launched. They row away from the wreck because they're afraid of the suction. There is, in fact, very little suction when the ship goes down, but they're afraid of suction when the ship goes down.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
9. The Long Hours Before Dawn
So they row away from the wreck. And the other thing they're afraid of is that there's hundreds of screaming people in the water who... are trying to get into a lifeboat, and there's empty places in these lifeboats. Some of the lifeboats are a third full. And so the lifeboats are then in the dilemma of, do we go back and try to rescue people actually in the water?
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
9. The Long Hours Before Dawn
I think we would all like to think that of course those lifeboats went back and they picked up people because that's what you do. Well, they didn't. The lifeboats stayed exactly where they were because they're afraid of getting swamped, right? They're afraid that if they go back, so many people are gonna be trying to get the lifeboat that it's gonna sink the lifeboat.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
9. The Long Hours Before Dawn
I think it's very difficult for people, even if somebody in the lifeboat was having a kind of twinge of moral conscience, or even if they were thinking, oh, I really want to go try to rescue my husband, you know, the other people in the boat are going to say, no, we're not going to do that. And it's very hard, right, for one person to kind of convince a group to do something.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
9. The Long Hours Before Dawn
He fairly heroically gets them to kind of lean one way or the other, keeps the thing afloat until most of them A few of them, I think, die because it's so difficult to stay on there, but he saves most of those men.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
9. The Long Hours Before Dawn
We have to remember that these aren't just random people in the water, right? In many cases, they are the husbands and sons and relatives and friends and whatever of people in the lifeboats.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
9. The Long Hours Before Dawn
There are stories that said that Molly Brown and, in fact, other women in the lightboats were saying, we need to go back.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
9. The Long Hours Before Dawn
Fifth Officer Lowe does go back, but even he carefully calculates, and this sounds horrible, so I apologize for having to say it, but he carefully calculates the right moment when the screams have died down, right? And he sits there and he says, okay, now there won't be so many people who will swamp us, so I can go back and at least rescue some few people.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
9. The Long Hours Before Dawn
You know, and this makes him sound quite callous, but in fact, again, he is the only officer who goes back, right? The others don't go back at all. So Lowe goes back, but he only manages to pull, I think, three people out of the water. I think one of them dies later anyway. So he's miscalculated, right? He's left the people in the water for too long in that freezing water.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
9. The Long Hours Before Dawn
The baker on the Titanic, what he does, and maybe because he does have a sense of what awaits him, is he starts drinking. And so he is able to actually survive in the water for a lot longer because he's basically put this antifreeze in his blood.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
9. The Long Hours Before Dawn
You know, maybe your doctor would know this better than I do, but apparently alcohol, for all that it's not good for us, right, it is a natural antifreeze. And so he survives in the water for like 45 minutes and then is pulled out, right, of the water and actually does manage to survive.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
There were certainly stories about Murdoch. You know, I would say those stories were probably, you know, post-sinking inventions that were sort of, you know, blaming Murdoch because he was in charge of the ship at the time. And so this assumption that he felt guilt. There were certainly reports of passengers seeing officers shoot themselves.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
You know, as a historian, I can say that, you know, eyewitness accounts, much as we like to rely on them, are often not very accurate, right? So I would, you know, be a little bit skeptical.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
I've been to his hometown in Scotland, and people there are quite sensitive about, you know, how Murdoch has been treated.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
It's an incredibly violent event. The ship starts to tear itself apart as the hull is subjected to these incredible forces, you know, because the bow's full of water, the stern is not. And so the weight of the bow just pushing on the stern and literally breaking the ship apart.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
Yeah. I mean, to be somewhat gory about it, his face was utterly, I mean, and this is a famous man, you know, everybody knew what he looked like and his face was utterly unrecognizable. So it was just the fact that because he was a rich person, his clothing was monogrammed, right? So everything was JJA and that's how they were actually able to identify him.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
There's this idea that captains are supposed to go down with their ships in this kind of heroic way, you know, help to save all the passengers and then nobly go down with a ship. Because that idea is so strong, there were certainly myths about Captain Smith that were invented later.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
So there were stories about him that he was seen swimming around in the water with a baby and he sort of swam up to a lifeboat and handed them a baby. And then they were, you know, they tried to convince him to, you know, to get on board the lifeboat. He was like, no, I can't do that and swam away, never to be seen again.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
You know, it's a great question of what was Captain Smith doing while the sinking was going on. He's a curiously absent figure. I don't really mean that to criticize him, but we don't really know. He certainly wasn't swimming around in the water handing babies off to lifeboats. I think that's safe to say.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
Everybody who's still on the ship will have retreated to the stern by that point, right? Because that's the part of the ship that's the most out of the water. But the stern, you know, I think probably, you know, all kinds of things were exploding and blowing up, you know, just as it went under.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
The stern is just a mess. It's just a tangled mess of metal and cables, and it's hardly recognizable at all. And you get a sense of the kind of violence of the last moments of the ship from seeing that.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
The compartments didn't have a watertight top was the issue. And so what happened when that many compartments were opened is that as the ones in the front filled up and that pulled the bow of the ship down, then the water would spill over into the next compartment and the next compartment.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
You know, you can tell how much they were thinking they were never going to have to use them because they put them in this position that you basically couldn't get them down in any way.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
One side, the lifeboats are hanging way far out on the side of the ship, and it's very hard to even get in them, right? You're having to literally jump from the side of the ship into a lifeboat with a very steep fall if you happen to miss, and some people do miss, right? Or they kind of end up grabbing the side of the lifeboat and have to be hauled in, so it's a very, very terrifying thing.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
8. Every Man for Himself
On the other side, the problem is that the lifeboats are now hitting the side of the ship as they're being lowered, and so they're kind of bouncing down the side of the ship. So it's a very, very scary process.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
5. The Moment of Impact
Just imagine what it was like to be Thomas Andrews who's built this ship and then he realizes what's about to happen. You know, he knows that the ship is doomed from the moment that he sees the sort of extent of the damage.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
5. The Moment of Impact
And so now they've got the question of, you know, what to do, how to try to get people off the ship. They are also immediately aware that there are not enough lifeboats on the ship, right? It had more lifeboats than it was required to have, actually, by law at the time. That's not enough to hold the passengers on the Titanic.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
5. The Moment of Impact
If Murdoch had made what would have been a terrifying but probably correct decision to say, we cannot possibly turn this ship in time, so we're just going to ram into the iceberg head-on. The Titanic was designed to survive that kind of collision. He would have crumpled the bow.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
5. The Moment of Impact
He probably would have killed 200 people in the front of the ship because the impact of something that big, of that ship hitting a big iceberg full-on, would have been absolutely devastating. It just would have crushed the front of the ship and killed a lot of people in the process. But the ship would have survived.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
5. The Moment of Impact
The impact in some ways is so slight and so fluky that if they'd just been able to turn like 10 more feet or something, they probably would have missed that iceberg entirely. Not blaming Murdoch, right? Murdoch's had enough criticism heaped on his head, right? I've been to his hometown in Scotland and people there are quite sensitive about how Murdoch has been treated.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
5. The Moment of Impact
So I don't want to add any criticism of Murdoch because I think he was in an impossible position, right? And I think he does the best he can. We are Theresa and Nemo and that's why we switched to Shopify.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
5. The Moment of Impact
The total size of the hole that was open to the ocean is about the size of a doorframe, right? It's very, very small.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
5. The Moment of Impact
When the wreck was discovered, I think everybody thought there was going to be a gaping hole in the side of the ship, right? Well, it's not. It's a line, really, more than it's a hole. It's maybe six inches wide that runs down the side of the ship
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
It's not malicious intent. It's not that people in steerage are being locked down below and not allowed up to the upper decks. They just had massive disadvantages in trying to get up. And nobody thought about them, right? Nobody thought about, oh my God, there's all these people down there in steerage. What are we going to do?
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
We've got to go down there and we've got to help them and we've got to get them up.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
I mean, certainly first class children would have been the absolute priority, you know, I think followed by first class women. As to someone would have valued the life of a steerage class child over a first class man, I mean, I hate to say it, but I suspect that they would not have. I think today, obviously we would see that as, you know, get the kids in the boat first of any class.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
And I think that's something that very much would have changed. But at the time, I think that would have been a more difficult question for people to wrestle with.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
At first, everything's very calm, right? The passengers can't really believe this is happening. As, obviously, the night goes on, more panic starts to set in, and the officers are trying to deal with that as well.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
this sort of ruthless gender code, right? The light teller, again, is the one who interprets the order as women and children only, right? And he interprets it in a very strict fashion. So I think it's interesting that that kind of level of ruthless genderizing, right, of who should live and who should die in terms of the Titanic story.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
I think at the time, he's regarded as an officer who followed orders and did what he was supposed to do.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
He probably kills 100 people by not letting any men in the boats. It's idiotic, right? I mean, he's literally launching boats with empty seats in them because he's adhering to this gender code so strictly. But I'm not sure that's an indictment of him. I think it's an indictment of the sort of standards of the time. Men enjoyed a lot of privileges and powers that women simply didn't have.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
But the price they sort of paid for that, right, was they were expected to kind of chivalrously step aside in a case like this.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
I think in some ways, you know, we still see women and children first as a kind of noble idea, right? We haven't, even in an age of more feminism or more gender equality, we haven't entirely lost that sense that the world was a better place when people had these kind of noble ideas about chivalry.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
He puts on his tuxedo famously, right? And he says, we are dressed in our best and prepared to go down like gentlemen. Bringing his servant with him into this, right? I mean, does the servant really have any choice? Could the servant say, hey boss, you know, I'd really rather go get in a lifeboat. Do I have to be part of this like noble impulse of yours to do this?
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
You know, I always feel very much for the servant in that story.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
Ida Strauss, when given an opportunity to get in a lifeboat, says, no, I have lived my entire life with my husband. I'm going to die with my husband here.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
Something we all like to contemplate about the Titanic story is what would we do? If I were on that ship and I were in that moment, what would we do?
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
And we all would like to think, right, that we would be the calm, we would be Ben Hugenheim, you know, or we would be Ida Strauss, you know, that we would be calm and we would be behaving in this impeccable and we would be letting, you know, we would be carefully evaluating, like, who deserves to live more than us and letting them into the boats and whatever.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
We would see that now as he was in some kind of, you know, catatonic shock. But in 1912, his behavior is interpreted as quite heroic. This is what a man of his class and stature should do.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
Some of them go off less than a third full. And part of that's because early on, they can't really convince people to get into the lifeboats. People are like, why would I want to get off this nice warm ship and go out there in the freezing cold ocean? The ship seems a lot safer. But part of it also is because the lifeboats are not being loaded in a very kind of orderly fashion.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
Everybody is in a sort of state of shock. And it's a kind of gradually dawning shock, right? Because it doesn't happen sort of instantaneously. The Titanic disaster, they have two hours and 40 minutes over which the sinking getaway goes from everything's fine to the ship is under the water. And I think people's behavior evolves over that time. I think different people react in different ways.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
The ship is a bewildering maze of corridors. Even the officers and the crew of the ship were not, you know, there was a new ship. Nobody was really familiar with it. So officers who had, you know, great experience at sea would say that they couldn't find their way around the ship. You know, one crewman said that he was on the ship for a week before he really knew his way around.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
7. Women and Children First
And so trying to get around the ship was very, very difficult. The ship was designed to make it difficult so that steerage class passengers wouldn't accidentally wander into first or second class areas.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
I think they are great. They say more about us than about the Titanic. There were two British journalists who wrote a book about it, The Riddle of the Titanic. And the second one was called The Ship That Never Sank because those books sold so well. Although they have to be looked upon as fairy tales, they sold so well that so many people read them. And some people even believe in this.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
One of those stories is that because of accidents that had happened with the Olympic, She was so damaged that they couldn't repair her, and therefore it was decided they would be swapped to Olympic and Titanic, and that the Olympic, now called the Titanic, was to be sunk in the mid-Atlantic. It's a very far-fetched theory, very interesting.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
You could actually sail on the Titanic and not until you reached harbor you'd realize you'd been on a ship, because the interiors were so great. They had spent an enormous amount of money to make it look like a palace.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
There is only one more story that is more popular in the history of mankind and that is the story of how Jesus was crucified.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
They had been testing a lot and realized that the cost for driving a ship so fast to beat Lusitania and Mauritania was impossible because the cost was far too high. So it was decided that they should not build high-speed vessels. It was safety, luxury and comfort which was the important main issues when building these ships.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
So there was one eyewitness account that said this. I think most Titanic historians, including myself, have always found it very implausible that they were going to try to dock a ship the size of Titanic in New York at night, right, in the dark, essentially. If we think about particularly the quality of like electric lighting that would have been available at the time.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
And also that there would have been a big kind of welcome ceremony arranged for the following morning. So, in fact, it probably would have garnered less publicity, not more for the Titanic to arrive at night. So all of this seems highly implausible.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
He's kind of showing off this new technology of radio that they have on board that, you know, he can actually get these messages. You know, they've never been able to do this before. He's sort of showing them off to passengers, right, to say, hey, look, you know, we're going to be entering an ice field soon. Isn't that exciting?
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
And I think some of the passengers are like, are we going to slow down? He's like, of course not. We're not going to slow down.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
He's sort of gone to Europe for a while to kind of escape the press hostility. And then they're actually finally decided that it's going to be safe to come back to New York, that they can come back and at least begin to get out from under the scandal that's been surrounding him with this young wife.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
It's hard to point to anything that Captain Smith does or doesn't do that is radically different from any other captain at the time. You know, if something's working against him, right, it's his long experience. Experience can be a great thing. It can, you know, teach us all kinds of things about what to do and what not to do. In his case, I think it did breed a certain complacency, right?
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
That he'd always done things in this way and he was going to continue to do them this way. But I don't think a younger captain probably would have behaved particularly differently. I think what he does is very standard practice of the time. So it's that standard practice we probably need to criticize and not anything that Smith does or doesn't do.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
It was a really bad season for ice. It had been quite a warm winter. And so a lot of ice had broken off of the glaciers in the Arctic and had drifted into the North Atlantic shipping lanes. You know, everybody knew that. But again, it was something that they thought of as that sort of modern shipbuilding technology had conquered that.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
You know, maybe 20 years ago, some ship disappeared and was never heard from again. And maybe it hit an iceberg. But there's really no record of an iceberg being able to do that kind of damage to a ship. It's always been fine.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
They were getting all these ice warnings, why not stop? It's unthinkable that they would have stopped. It's just unthinkable. It's unthinkable they would have slowed down by the kind of sailing conventions of the time. It just looks very, very different with hindsight.